Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Would 16,000 Saudi grads from Canadian universities not signal greater change at home than this tweet?

If I were a registrar
at a Canadian university this morning, I would be calculating the drop in
revenues (some $15 billion in total to all) to my institution from the Saudi
Arabian decision to withdraw all 16,000 Saudi students currently enrolled in
Canadian universities and enrol them in either British or American schools.
These students are enrolled with the support of Saudi scholarships and those
dollars will no longer be flowing into the Canadian university coffers.

International students
pay a significantly higher tuition (4 times higher) than do Canadian students.
And after I had made those preliminary calculations, I would be wondering how
to approach the Foreign Affairs department in Ottawa, to ascertain their “read”
on the likely outcome of this spat.

It seems that a tweet,
(who knew that tweets were now the currency of diplomacy?) asking for the
“immediate release” of human rights activists by the Saudi’s so offended the
Saudi government (Canada is interfering in the internal affairs of our country)
that they have withdrawn their ambassador from Ottawa and frozen all trade and
commercial transactions with the Canadian government. Whether or not the
sale/purchase of those light armored vehicles from Canada to the Saudi’s will
be consummated is an open question this morning.

According to the
National Post, the young Saudi prince “has already started a war with Yemen,
isolated Qatar, and picked fights with Sweden and Germany when those countries
questioned his country’s commitment to human rights.” The point being that the
Foreign Affairs minister Chrystia Freeland might have known that a spat like
this one was imminent if Canada “intervened” in the Saudi reputation on human
rights.

Already announced by
the Saudi’s is the sale of a portion of the massive oil company owned by that
state, dangling business opportunities for countries like Canada in the sale of
fossil fuel equipment and expertise, all of which could now be in jeopardy.
Given the already instability injected into the world trade picture by the
American president, Canada once saw the opportunity to diversify our trade, in
part, by increased trade with Saudi Arabia. That prospect today seems a little
doubtful, if not off the table.

The complex interwoven
relationship, heretofore, between trade and human rights, has often resulted in
countries like Canada that pride themselves in our human rights record
(excepting the nation’s history with indigenous peoples) holding back on public
criticism of the human rights record of their trading partners, for example,
like China. Is that previous stance now outdated by the recent surge of
“retaliatory” moves like this current one from the Saudi’s? Is the former
“world order” on trade now being undercut by repressive regimes’ feeling
emboldened to strike back if and when challenged? Could this new abrasive approach,
(even confrontational) be partially a consequence of the arrival on the world
stage of the U.S. president, apparently a sycophantic friend of the Saudi’s,
who recently sold a considerable supply of military equipment to them over the
next decade? Was that sale, for example, another of trump’s multilayered
chicanery tactics to stick his thumb in the eye of Iran, the opponent of Saudi
Arabia specifically in Yemen? Is it too much of a stretch to wonder out loud if
the Saudi’s are not playing into (if not actually playing the hand of) trump’s
deviousness? Could NAFTA negotiations be one of the ‘hidden’ impacts of this
Saudi move, even though no one, including the officials in Foreign Affairs,
will likely be able to prove any connection?

And will the universities
in Canada, in whose financial liquidity the federal government has a direct
role, petition Ottawa to replace the funds removed by this extraction of Saudi
students currently enrolled in Canadian universities?

The Saudi’s are
complaining that they are making progress towards women’s equality, with their
“right to drive” shift in the last few weeks. They resent any public scorn of
their right as a nation to make the kind of changes at the pace of their own
choosing and clearly women’s rights rank much higher in North America than they
do in the Middle East, at least in some countries.

Is Freeland on solid
ground in her vigorous advocacy of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia? Perhaps, yet
I wonder if she might have had leverage to curtail or actually to cancel that
sale of light armoured vehicles to the Saudi’s, if she wanted to make a
statement about how this government is going to behave on the world stage. That
might not have had the direct “in-your-face” quality of the latest tweet, but
would have staked out a Canadian position that we are not in the business of
supporting increased military war in the Middle East, even through the sale and
eventual deployment of our vehicles. And that, in itself, would have indirectly
made a statement that she and all of Canada knows would be welcomed by the
majority of Canadian women, and women around the world.

Diplomacy, if and when
it becomes little more than a few angry tweets, devolves into the kind of world
trump seems more than capable and desirous of generating, Tweeting, therefore,
is a means of communicating that our nation ought to be avoiding at all cost.
To enter that fray is to prop up the trump model of engagement on the world
stage.

Can Canadians hope that
whoever “penned” that tweet is disciplined inside the Foreign Affairs
department? Doubtful. Can Canadians expect that Freeland, who has served in an
exemplary manner as our representative on the world stage since 2015, will
soften her approach to the Saudi’s, and re-integrate the Saudi ambassador into
the diplomatic community in Ottawa, and reverse the removal of those 16,000
Saudi students from Canadian universities. After all, their very presence in
those institutions, followed by their return to their homeland following
graduation, is another inevitable if glacial step in the transformation of the
Saudi culture, and indeed of the culture of the Middle East. That observation
is hardly “rocket science” and surely it is not outside the purview of the
Foreign Affairs minister.

One tweet, even one so
offensive to the Saudi’s, ought not to be a pivotal turning point in a
relationship that could with increased discretion, diplomacy and mutual respect
be mutually beneficial for many decades.

Reports later in the
day indicate Minister Freeland is “sticking to her position” on the tweet,
while the U.S. and the EU are both seeking further clarification from Saudi
Arabia. The Canadian Minister of Finance tells the world, We are standing up
for what we believe in!” standing firmly behind Freeland. The Europeans tell us
that the Saudi’s will not longer accept shipments of Canadian wheat, deepening
the ditch, or perhaps hole, that this dispute is fostering.

We all expect that the
Prime Minister will endorse Freeland and Morneau’s position on this one, given
his commitment to the cause of feminism here and around the world. It seems,
however, that feminism is an extremely worthy public issue warranting the
persistent and consistent support of all developed countries. Yet, one wonders
if this spat has the potential to set back the Saudi’s commitment to full and
equal rights for the women living in their kingdom. If that turns out to be
part of the fallout, then the Canadian government will have sabotaged the very
cause to which they are so deeply and authentically committed.